Depending on your powers of perception, or, more apropos for Gaudi Afternoon, your intuition (feminine or otherwise), it may take you a while before you realize that the film you are watching with a raised eyebrow is not a standard mystifying tale of intrigue, or a wacky cross-gender comedy using Barcelona and the flamboyant architecture of Antoni Gaudi as the backdrop – it’s very seriously about motherhood. Not parenthood, motherhood. What it means to feel maternally toward a child. A power women inherently possess, not men, and the film explores the necessity for women (broadly speaking) to express this instinctual force.

Susan (Desperately Seeking Susan, Sex and the City) Seidelman’s strange, exotic film opens on Cassandra Reilly, a woman you can imagine by piecing together literary characters from Virginia Woolf to Jo March to Brett Ashley. She fled home at eighteen and has traveled the world, getting herself sullied and hardened as a journalist.  A life you would assume overflows with fulfilling and fascinating experiences, but where is Cassandra now?  In a shabby apartment in Spain, barely able to pay her rent, translating a book about a large woman who eats ferociously in the South American jungles as her daughter gravitates toward her.  She is past her prime with only a cat and a headache to show for all her years hopping the globe doing “meaningful” work.  Her future appears to be someplace bleak and lonely, sad and dark. You’re first reaction, which is a correct one, will be, “this woman needs a family or some love in her life or another pet.”

But alas, the loopy xylophone music from the opening credits returns and the series of mysterious encounters that make up the bulk of Gaudi Afternoon begins.  A woman (Marcia Gay Harden, who pulls off something incredible here but to disclose it would be wrong) wants to hire “Cassie” as a translator to assist in finding her, hmmmm, her Ben.

Cassandra, on the surface, gets caught up in the complicated affair because she needs the job, but what keeps her involved is the sheer boredom and incompleteness of her actual life. Let’s face it – Gay Harden’s Frankie, Lili Taylor’s Ben, Juliet Lewis’s April and show stopping Christopher Bowen’s Hamilton are some interesting folks. They would spice up anyone’s life – and Cassandra has slipped into a dreary existence, perhaps without knowing exactly where she went wrong.

The film then begins to jump playfully across plot lines and gender lines, which seemingly have no real purpose but to keep things lightheartedly interesting. Only at certain key moments where crucial twists are revealed and truths are expressed can we begin to formulate a theory about the larger picture. As we begin to detect motivations behind the lunacy of each character, the clouds lift just enough for us to see that everything comes down to the desire to be a good Mom. Of course this enormous passion swelling in woman’s heart has great potential for both good and evil, and the film concentrates on both. In fact, most of Gaudi Afternoon revolves around how this instinct to protect and love a child can be raised to a crazed level that ultimately tortures and scars children.

The style of filmmaking is unique and not for everyone. It is what Seidelman calls “heightened reality.” She explained to me on Ta’anis Esther that the method involves elements of fantasy rooted in something relevant and serious. She compared it to her work on Sex and the City. “The issues on the show are serious, but you are not going to find actual people like [the women on the show] in reality”, she said. 

Gaudi Afternoon is mostly dream, part nightmare (Bowen’s magic act is one of the creepiest scenes I have witnessed in a long time), and part morality play surrounding the concept of mothering a young girl. It is possible to get wrapped up in one of the three and entirely miss the other two and this is the difficulty of spending time in heightened reality. Appreciation for a film like this relies heavily on the development of the audience’s individual senses.

Q: How did growing up in a Jewish home affect your view of family life and motherhood?

A: In Confessions of a Suburban Girl (A mock-documentary filmed for the BBC about Seidelman’s reunion with four Jewish friends from her youth, growing up in the suburbs of Philly) my friends and I looked back on our lives and saw that life did not turn out as we thought it would. Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia was a lot like living in a fishbowl. I was looking for some diversity in life and that is why I came to New York after I left home. But my Jewish background did shape my view of family because family is so important in the Jewish [community]. I am the mother of a thirteen year old boy and I realize that it’s hard to do both, be a film director and a mother. Sometimes I’m not being the best mother I can be because of the filmmaking and sometimes it works the other way around.

----------------------------------------------------

Send comments to Jordan about this article to jtrick1@aol.com